Wesley Stace, a k a John Wesley Harding, on 'not being a dick', the Cabinet of Wonders and Walter Benjamin
John Stace. Allison Michael Orenstein.
2:24 pm Oct. 28, 2011
Wesley Stace was leaning against a railing on the back porch of the Norwood Club on West 14th Street, where the slight stirring of fall's chill was in the air.
“I’m horrified by being overwhelmed by nothingness,” a mustachioed fellow porch-stander said, between drags from his cigarette; he'd already admitted to eavesdropping on Stace and apologized for entering the conversation unbidden. “I’m lost without anything I can touch or put in my hand."
The topic was digital music.
“It’s like that Walter Benjamin essay,” Stace replied, his English-accented voice a bit smoky too. “The one about the piece of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. He talks about the aura, and that essay’s got to be more valid now than it ever was. Who knew when CDs came out that the next thing would be nothing?” The eavesdropper nodded appreciatively; if not comforted, he seemed to feel at least understood.
A singer-songwriter, novelist, and impresario, Stace had his third highly acclaimed novel, Charles Jessold, Considered As A Murderer, published this spring; he put out his twelfth studio album, The Sound of His Own Voice, under the name by which he’s best known, John Wesley Harding, earlier this month.
Stace is also set to revive his beloved Cabinet of Wonders variety shows tonight at City Winery. He keeps rather busy for someone whose job it is to produce nothing.
“Sometimes I intersect with the marketplace better than other times,” Stace offered by way of an explanation for the vicissitudes of his success over the past two and a half decades that he’s been making music and, more recently, writing novels. “Before I made this album I hoped it was good and went in with the heart wide open. When I finished the album I thought, It’s probably the best record I could possibly make right now.”
He made the album with a crack team of highly talented friends, including Rosanne Cash, R.E.M. co-founder Peter Buck, Decemberist John Moen, Steve Berlin, John Roderick, Laura Veirs, and many more. The album is bookended by two refreshingly reflective tunes, both about songwriting, titled “Sing Your own Song” and “The World in Song.”
“I always give the albums a working title,” Stace said, “and for this one it was ‘Songs About Songs.’ I think that there’s been a bit of an interesting shift in my songwriting lately, and I think it’s because the novels that I write are taking care of the fictional element, and my songwriting has been freed up to be a lot more personal, although not in all cases. Everyone asks me about the song 'I Should Have Stopped,' and they go 'Who is that woman?'; and the answer is that I just made it up! It’s a short story about a man who isn’t me who has an unhappy marriage, seeing a girl from the old days and not going up and saying hi to her and remembering their sexcapades. Dumb word, that.”
Other dumb questions Stace gets all the time include “Do you like Elvis Costello?” (his early albums have plenty of sonic similarities to Costello), “How is writing novels different from writing songs?” and, most recently, “What’s it feel like being a Renaissance man?”
“People are very kind to ask that,” he said, “and I’m like ‘Well, standards have dropped, because I don’t know anything about science and technology, or alchemy.' To me it’s much simpler than any of those things. I like writing! I know some chords on the guitar!”
Asked about choosing his alias, which comes from the title of the 1967 Bob Dylan album, Stace said: “I’m glad I did it because by the time I had put together a novel I put it out under my real name, and that meant I wasn’t putting the fact that I was a musician under writers’ noses, so they didn’t give my musician’s novel the polite pat on the back that I see happen to so many other musicians. they read the novel as a novel. Josh Ritter put out a wonderful novel this year, and saw it given that kind of pat on the back, and that is not the way to approach anything. People essentially don’t really like people who do two things.”
Yet they seem to like the Cabinet of Wonders enough that it sells out every time it appears. Hatched as a one-off for a record release party, Stace’s salon-like events have become a regular and distinct success in New York's nightlife.
“I started bubbling the idea around thinking how many musicians we need for a house band, and we need to make it a bit more vaudeville-ey, that’ll mean we’ll need a ventriloquist, and I’ll be like a ringmaster,” Stace recalled of planning the first Cabinet. “The genesis of it was slightly selfish, which was to do a memorable show by getting great acts to promote my album. Well what I ended up doing was signing up for a series of three of them, and it got rolling.”
Since then the Cabinet has featured lots of great guests including A. C. Newman, Rhett Miller, Eugene Mirman, David Gates, Tanya Donelly, Martha Plimpton, Todd Barry, Steve Almond, Sarah Vowell, Sondre Lerche, Janeane Garofalo. These musicians, writers, actors, comics, and other multitalented folks show off their skills (singing, reading, joking) while also trading places and allowing audiences to see people doing the two (or more) things they do that Stace finds so compelling.
Though he’d spent plenty of time living elsewhere, Stace’s most permanent home until last year was Brooklyn (he now lives with his wife and two daughters just outside Philadelphia). He’s taken the circular route through the states, but might not stay here forever.
“When I run out of places I’ll just fuck off home” to England, he said.
In the meantime, there’s no place for the Cabinet but New York.
“I think it would only happen in New York and, though I’ve never done it there, in L.A.," he said. "Here’s why: Eugene Mirman [and I] took it on tour as Wesley and Eugene’s Cabinet of Wonders ... It was really fun, but in Portland: I go in there, and I basically hijacked their local scene with people they see all the time anyway, like Colin Meloy. If he came here it would be a big event, sell a lot of tickets. In Portland? Not so much.”
It’s little wonder Stace’s tastes and performances eventually ran in the music-hall and vaudeville direction given his family background, which he spoke of tenderly.
“My grandfather was a magician, and a ventriloquist, and the dummy on cover of my album By George was his dummy that he played with for the troops in the Second World War, and my grandmother was his assistant. One of my sisters is currently in a circus called Teatro ZinZanni when it was in San Francisco and now it’s called circus Palazzo Rotterdam. My other sister is doing an opera-singing course in Bologna. My mother teaches singing and was an opera singer. There’s a lot of it about in my family.”
And despite making his career largely as a solo artist and performer (always worth remembering, he points out, that solo performers don’t have to share the night’s take with anyone), he stressed that for him, the appeal of being any kind of musician is the necessity of collaboration.
“Music is a collaborative and social activity,” he said. This led him somewhere else.
Hence bad hijacking and good hijacking.
“A singer-songwriter has, I think, a few rights in life,” he said, “and one is that he can hijack any band he or she wants, because you don’t need to have your own band all the time. So you can just grab Los Lobos or the Rolling Stones.”
And why just hijack the sound when you can also hijack the actual musicians? Years of touring and not being "a dick” evidently have played a part in the quality control at the Cabinet of Wonders.
“What happens in rock and roll is that if you’re swinging through the same city you see them. And if you see them five times say over 15 years? You’re friends! I mean, there’s plenty of musicians out there who I’m like, 'Come on we’ve met five times. You know who I am. Don’t be a dick. But you’re the lead singer in bleb bleh bleh,' and so those people are not in the Cabinet of Wonders!”
Before he began preparing to make the drive back to Philadelphia to catch his kids before bedtime, he answered the stupid question after all, even if it hadn't been asked.
“Writing songs and novels are of course different,” he said, “but they’re all part of the same creative endeavor, as is the Cabinet of Wonders shows, which is avoiding having a 9 to 5 job, doing what I want to do, loving music and literature. I’ve always been a huge fan and proselytizer of books and music, and both developed into careers in those fields.”
Not being a dick, avoiding having a 9 to 5 job, and loving music and literature doesn't always make someone a famous artistic polymath. I asked him if he was at all self-conscious.
“There are ways in which I am self-conscious,” Stace said. “Everybody is. But making music, falling about on a stage, making a fool of myself; none of those are ways in which I am self-conscious. I’m very comfortable doing all those things. I like to make mistakes. I will go with a mistake. I will let the mistake dictate the next thing I do. What I do in the Cabinet of Wonders, it might even seem a bit goofy, but it doesn’t worry me because everything on there, I like, I built the show on my tastes. All I care about is that people come to see the one person they like doing something they’ve never seen before, writers singing, singers reading, and so on. These people have these other things that they do.
"Society as a whole does not like that," he said, "and that’s why I’m so lucky that I took a really bad stage name at the beginning of my career, because I didn’t want anyone to know that I was making music.”
